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Digital Innovator

Published

March 15, 2011

A Digital Innovation Fellowship will allow Professor of Music Richard Freedman to reconstruct missing parts of an important repertory of 16th-century French songs.

Professor of Music Richard Freedman has been awarded a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Freedman's project, titled Recovering Lost Voices: A Digital Workshop for the Restoration of Renaissance Polyphony, will enlist an international team of scholars and information technologists to reconstruct missing voice parts for an important but neglected repertory of sixteenth-century French polyphonic songs.

The fellowship from the ACLS, a federation of 70 national scholarly organizations, will allow Freedman to combine reconstructions with facsimiles and scholarly commentaries via the Music Encoding Initiative. (That initiative is working to create a commonly-accepted, digital, symbolic representation of music notation documents that will allow the field of musicology to make full use of digital technologies.) The result of the Recovering Lost Voices project, says Freedman, will be a collaborative tool for use by all scholars, students, and performers of early music.